The Wheel of Osheim

Alica Kendeth, the Red Queen, surged to her feet with a roar of fury, sword swinging.

With a cry the Lady Blue broke away from the contest, turning on a heel, somehow fast enough that the point of Grandmother’s sword only ploughed a furrow through her shoulder, and threw herself toward her last mirror. toward Osheim, and me. For a split second her image filled the facet. She hit the remaining fractures and they cut her like wires through cheese. And she was gone—nothing remaining on the mirror save a crimson wash, the room beyond seen dimly through it. Blood trickled down across the image of the Red Queen, her sword extended, the point against the mirror that her enemy had leapt through. I had little doubt that a visit to the fractal mirror far below us would reveal a wet heap of cleanly sliced body parts—the last remains of a woman who would have sacrificed one world to be a god in another.

Edris’s blade flickered my way. I almost didn’t turn it from my chest. My inattention earned me a shallow cut across my upper arm. The panels on the far wall burned red now and I thought I saw a figure moving beyond them, as if each were a window through the wall to some space beyond. The sound had died somewhat, reduced to deep metallic groans and the slow noise of a ratchet as one tooth after the next is drawn through it.

Edris feinted at me, our blades scraping edges. “I don’t have time to kill you,” he said. “Fortunately I brought someone with me who does.” He backed away and the unborn unfolded itself spider-like from the darkened ceiling where it had hidden in the shadows behind the pillars. It descended into the space Edris opened between us, a horror built from fresh meat rearranged about the bones of the men the Lady Blue had sent with Edris. A torso on thick legs, lowered by five raw and skinny limbs emerging from its open chest, each reaching two yards or longer, jointed in a dozen places, and ending in a sharp bone spike.

Edris turned his back and walked to the far wall and the key. “With that sword you stole from me maybe you’ll even send her back to Hell. But she’ll still be bound to the lichkin. Either way, it will buy me the time I need and I’ll deal with you myself afterwards if I have to.” He set his hand to the key and gasped as its lies wrapped him. “Though there isn’t going to be an after.” His wrist turned, forcing the key the other way, and the great engines howled a new note. “This is the way the world ends. No bangs, no whimpers, just the turning of a wheel.”

In the end there are few things more likely to squeeze stupidity and courage from a man in equal meas-ures—if indeed they are not both the same thing. Family will do it, and so will the sight of someone you hate with a passion about to seize their moment of triumph.

“Never underestimate what a son of Kendeth will sacrifice for his sister.” The words came from my lips without any hint of fear.

It wasn’t a berserk that took me. I think the rage that enveloped me the day I cut Maeres Allus’s throat had never truly let go, never bundled itself back into the tiny and forgotten space where I had once kept it, but mixed with my blood as with any other man, sometimes quiet, sometimes loud. The anger that raised my hand was all mine, owned and paid for. I threw Edris’s sword hilt over tip, turning through the air just as the key had. And just as Loki’s key struck home, Edris’s unholy blade did so too, taking him between the shoulder-blades.

The unborn reared between us, its arms closing around me like the fingers of a hand. Somehow Snorri had seen the essence of his son within the unborn that attacked us inside the Black Fort’s vault. I hadn’t understood it then—how he saw his own inside that corrupt travesty of corpse flesh and wept to end it. I couldn’t see it now, but I knew my mother would have seen her daughter, and that was enough. It wasn’t my knife I plunged into the open heart of the unborn but the cardinal’s seal from that road far away, running along the Attar-Zagre border. And it wasn’t my faith that tore them apart, the child that never saw the world from the monster that was forged in Hell. It was the faith of the million and more, huddled in their churches, hiding from uneasy dreams in their beds, cowed by signs and portents, clinging to their god as the end of days drew near. That faith, that will, that belief, given power by the Wheel itself, split child from horror, and left the dead flesh shredded on the ground.

I hadn’t felt the spikes pierce me. I didn’t feel the pain until I rolled and, finding myself on the floor, tried to rise. The blood flooded from puncture wounds in my shoulders and side, running hot down my back. I slumped to one side and lay there, watching. Edris faced me now, his face contorted with fury, the point of his own sword emerging from just beneath his ribs.